


Traditions

by Ladybmorebelle



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Christmas, Cryophobia, Holiday, Loneliness, M/M, Traditions, atomwave, grumpy mick, tree theft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-15
Updated: 2017-11-15
Packaged: 2019-02-02 16:31:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12730203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladybmorebelle/pseuds/Ladybmorebelle
Summary: Christmas? Sucks. Cold weather? Sucks. The team? Sucks.But for the first time in a long time, things are looking up.





	Traditions

Sometimes, at night, when he was so tired he could barely pop open one more bottle cap, he remembered the scared little boy he had been, and he was cold.

Everyone had some experience with bullies - it was part of life, part of what made you tough - and when Mick had been a kid and pushed into a meat locker, he hadn’t thought the experience would have such a profound effect on him. But as the hours passed, and his fingers grew numb, and his lips were in a richtor of icy pain, he knew two things - his bully would be punished, and he would never allow himself to be cold again.

He burned that kid’s house down, with him inside. He became a villain. He was warm, and it was worth it.

Maybe that’s why he hated Christmas, anyway. Not because of the cheerfulness (which was awful) or the forced generosity (which was just another simpering way to hide humanity’s inherent selfishness) but because of the horrendous cold, the ice and snow you were supposed to enjoy but which ate at your skin like so many vats of acid.

He developed a pattern, his own kind of ritual, and each Christmas eve he’d steal something, burn something, and fuck something. Anything to keep the wind off his back; anything to stave off a sense of frozen isolation. And it was good - he loved warming himself in the hot flesh of someone he’d never see again. He loved admiring his purloined treasures, and he loved watching embers glow in the dark. 

He was used to his routine. Being on the Waverider, being a god damned hero, fucked all that up.

“Hey, Mick! Happy holidays! You doing anything, or…” 

Ray trailed off, looking at Mick’s face, and he got stuck somewhere between a smile and a grimace. 

“Go away, haircut.”

He pulled a bottle of beer out of the fabricator - and of course, Gideon couldn’t leave well enough alone, and it was a Christmas ale - and popped the top off with his teeth. Ray shrugged; Mick thought he saw a flash of hurt, there, on his smooth, tanned skin. He felt an urge to lay a kiss between his eyebrows, and caught himself in frustration. It was no good, getting soft.

The beer was the perfect temperature - just a few degrees colder than the room - and it tasted of orange peels and allspice. He drank it in three gulps, finishing the bottle right as he got to his bunk, and he almost turned back to the galley, and stopped. Ray was in there, decorating cookies with blue and white icing, and it was impossibly domestic, and it was all too horrible and too close. He remembered the mocking eyes of his classmate, the laughter as he was shoved into the meat locker, the feelings of helplessness. Imagining Ray’s focus, the way he bit his lip, a smudge of white sugar on his cheek…

Mick threw the bottle against the wall. Glass splintered into shards like ice.

Nate made it all worse, of course - he’d suggested decorating the ship, and being an historian, he’d replicated a perfect Victorian Christmas. The Waverider was lit up with artificial candles - a pathetic imitation of the unstoppable power of flame - and on the bridge was a gigantic, fragrant pine tree. Icicles of glass hung from every possible aperture. And everywhere there was a fine glitter, and it looked like snow, and sometimes in the dark between his bedroom and the next bottle of beer he saw the glitter and thought, I’m so cold. 

And it seemed like all the world had taken a pause in this late December - no aberrations appeared, no time bandits, no pirates, no one and nothing to get them off this stupid ship. Nothing to burn, nothing to kill. 

“Can we get out of this hellhole?”

Sara looked at him, mild annoyance in her eyes, and said what she’d been saying for a week.

“Something’ll turn up.”

He growled, low and gravely like sex on concrete. Ray shivered, and he thought, yeah, at least someone else is cold on this stupid ship. The idiot-genius shifted, like he was going to reach out, and then clasped his hands together and gritted his teeth.

Mick stalked back towards the galley and found that Nate had spread cookery books all over the counter.

“Goose?”

“What?” Mick didn’t look at him, just grunted, and waited for Gideon to fabricate a beer.

“Should we have goose for Christmas?”

“What do I care?” He twisted open the bottle, then smiled, just a bit, “Do I get to shoot it?”

“I think Gideon can probably take care of it.”

“Yeah. Then I really don’t care.”

He saw a plate of Ray’s cookies, shaped like stars, under a cookbook. He grabbed it - if other people wanted cookies, they could’ve taken them already - and walked back to his bunk. The cookies tasted like lemon and rosemary; the beer was fig and clove. 

“Fucking Christmas.”

The days counted down, closer and closer to Christmas Eve, and Mick thought that he had to get out - because without stealing and burning and fucking what was he, who would he be, and how would he spend the longest, coldest night? And he was angry, lashing out at everyone, and he programmed Gideon to overcook all the food, and Ray burned a whole batch of cookies. 

“You don’t have to be like this, you know.” 

He looked at Ray, who was scraping charred gingerbread into the trash with barely concealed disappointment, and his heart constricted.

“I’m not a good guy, haircut,” he paused at the door, twisted a knife of self-recrimination into his frozen heart, “You should get used to that.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Believe what you want.”

After Ray went to bed, Mick talked to Gideon and had her fix the fabricator. Not because he was being nice, or because it was Christmas, or because Ray looked so damned sad, but because he wanted more cookies, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to cook them himself. 

Stein tried to corner him, the day before Christmas Eve, and talked a lot of nonsense about healing and moving on and coming to terms. Mick didn’t have anything to say - he ignored the old professor and drank, steadily, five beers in a row. Nutmeg, raisin, malt, barley, hops, forgetfulness. Stein gave up, merely patting him on the shoulder, distant and wary. 

That night he couldn’t sleep - which was typical, but more than usually irritating - and he wandered the ship, taking the long way to the mess. Glitter crunched under his feet, and his rough features were gold in the light of Nate’s Victorian candles. The air smelled like cinnamon and pine, and he hated it all, hated the stupid ship and his team and he missed his stupid friend and he felt the walls of the meat locker closing in.

“Hey.”

Ray sat, his smile blurry around the edges. He had a bottle of brown liquid in front of him, a quarter of it gone. A tray of cookies - snickerdoodles, from the smell - was cooling on the counter. 

“Whatcha got, haircut?”

“Whiskey,” he yawned, stretching, and his back was taut with lithe muscle, “Pikesville Rye. Grandma used to drink it.”

Mick picked up the bottle, swallowed a mouthful, “Good for Grandma.”

“Why are you so unhappy?”

Mick was pretty sure that Ray wouldn’t have asked the question sober - and he knew he probably wouldn’t remember most of this conversation, so he sat down, propped his feet up, and answered.

“Cryophobia.”

Ray wrinkled his forehead in puzzlement; Mick tried not to think it was cute and poured him another drink.

“Fear of -”

“Not scared. That’s just the word. Means I hate the cold.”

“So the holidays?”

“They’re shitty anyway, but cold makes ‘em worse.”

Ray attempted to prop himself up with his elbows on the table and almost upended the tray of cookies.

“That why you like fire?”

“I like burning stuff. That’s what I’d be doing -” he grabbed a cookie, this time in the shape of a glass ornament, and waved it at Ray before devouring it in two bites. 

“Mick,” and he smiled, a sweet gesture of realization, “Do you burn things to celebrate Christmas?”

“Yep. What I always do, that and…”

Ray waited for him to finish, then watched him lick red and green icing from his thick fingers. He shook his head, like he was trying to focus and couldn’t quite manage it.

“And?”

“I steal stuff. Something stupid.”

“Stupid?”

“Big. Useless. Shiny.”

“Okay. Anything else?”

Mick laughed and grabbed another cookie. 

“Find somebody to fuck.”

“Oh,” and Ray, even in his drunken state, blushed, “Ah, okay.”

“Now you know, haircut. Still think I’m a nice guy?”

Ray smiled, and there was stupid, useless tenderness in it.

“I do.”

“Okay,” Mick took another swallow of whiskey and savored the burn.

He had to help Ray back to his bunk, and he didn’t know why he did it - didn’t know why he hadn’t left him in a puddle of whiskey and icing and drool. But Ray was warm, his arm over Mick’s broad shoulders, and he smelled like sugar and electricity and there was fire, there, under his skin. Mick dropped him in his bed and threw a blanket over him; he carefully ignored the way Ray smiled and held on to his hand just a second too long. 

“You’re my partner.”

“Go to sleep, haircut.”

Back in his own room, he pulled the bottle of rye from a hidden pocket of his coat. He unscrewed the cap and smelled ethanol and sweetness and he thought, Ray fucking Palmer. What an idiot.

And in the morning it was Christmas Eve, and Ray was stumbling a little, and Mick wondered if any of their conversation had stuck in that genius’s brain, and he hated himself for hoping. Nate was cooking a goose, after all - “I’m doing a beef roast tomorrow,” he’d said as he puttered around the kitchen in a red apron - and the ship was full of the smells of fat and citrus and spices and it was awful, truly horrendous, and Mick hid in the cargo bay with a six pack of twelve percent beer. 

“Psst.”

A voice in the hallway. Mick peered around the corner, everything wobbling a little, and there was Ray fucking Palmer with his heat gun.

“What’re you doing, haircut?”

“I have a plan.”

“This is gonna go well.”

“It’s a great plan. You wanna steal something?”

Mick put down his beer, cracked his neck, and smiled.

“You know I do,” he stood up, “What’re we stealing?”

“Nobody’s on the bridge,” Ray grinned, and he was impossibly handsome, “I think we should steal the tree.” 

Mick felt an unexpected twinge of excitement, “It is big.”

“And useless. And shiny.”

“And then?”

Ray lifted the heat gun, “And then, you’re gonna burn it.”

Mick threw back his head and laughed, and in the pit of his stomach was a slow burn, an arousal, like making love in the heart of the sun.

“What the hell. Let’s do it.”

The tree barely fit in the jumpship, and Ray didn’t tell him where they were going until they landed on a beach in Aruba and it was warm, it was so blessedly hot, and as the pine tree went up in flames, Mick could barely feel the frozen walls of the meat locker. And Ray was laughing, golden skin glistening in the heat, and Mick remembered that Ray had lost a lot, too, and he was alone, too, and he grabbed him and kissed him and it was the worst kiss in the history of the world because they were both laughing too much.

The second kiss was better. Much, much better.

Back on the Waverider, crammed in around a big table in Rip’s office, they stuffed their faces with goose - “Shoulda let me shoot it,” Mick said between mouthfuls, and Ray laughed - and they both smelled like cinders and ash, pine needles in their hair. Stein wondered aloud what happened to the tree; Sara looked over at the two of them, giving them a small, secret smile, and mumbled something about Ship Safety Protocol and Potential Injury and Possible Projectiles.

They all got drunk, together - not just Mick, alone, as usual, but the whole team - and they sang stupid Christmas songs and it was horrible, their voices were grating, they were possibly the most annoying people in all of time and space, and when Ray sang in Hebrew in a clear, deep baritone, Mick felt an unclenching, like the world could slip away. He wondered if that were what happiness felt like. Belonging.

They pulled Christmas crackers and wore the stupid paper hats and told predictable jokes and when he kissed Ray goodnight they were still laughing, and Ray’s tissue paper crown fell to the floor, ground into the glitter of fake snow.

“What about the last thing?”

“Huh?”

Ray smiled down at him, a few inches taller but sweet, yielding, “Your last Christmas tradition?”

“Ah, that.”

Mick put his hand on the back of Ray’s neck, and they were there, together, and they were warm.

“Gotta save something for tomorrow.”

**Author's Note:**

> I was inspired by Mick's backstory in the comics and by the atomwave challenges from last year. Also I'm currently listening to Christmas music 24/7. Thanks for reading!


End file.
